Your Basic Guide To The World Of Fanfiction

pls read and review, no flames!! <33

Fanfiction is a weird and beautiful corner of the Internet that not everyone understands.

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There's a lot more of us out there than you might think--and more to our world than just reading porn about our favorite characters. Though that's good, too.

Readers and writers of fanfic are all over the world, young and old.

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Ok, a lot of young. I myself began reading Twilight fanfictions at the ripe age of 13. That Edward/Bella, man. It really got me.

Fic exists for every fandom you can imagine.

archiveofourown.org

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And every relationship pairing you could (never) imagine.

archiveofourown.org

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Fanfiction.net is the largest, most popular website to find fanfiction.

Via fanfiction.net

It's also known for having the younger writers, which can lead to some interesting fics.

While archiveofourown.org is a beautiful, organized masterpiece for MATURE ADULTS.

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So many tags! I can sort by fandom and trope and genre and pairing and update date! And just look at that aesthetic! I LOVE YOU AO3!

And LiveJournal is just a total clusterfuck.

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I STILL don't know how to find shit on this site. Are there tags? Does anyone use them? Do authors even have pages? Wait, I have to be friends with you to read your fic???

Some fics are really, really good.

Via shoebox.lomara.org

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Some are...not.

Via poorlywrittenfanfiction.tumblr.com

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"for a moment, they were sharing saliva."

And some are so bad, it's actually amazing.

Via myimmortalrehost.webs.com

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BTW, this fic is called "My Immortal," and it's widely regarded as the worst fanfiction of all time. And you should all absolutely go read it.

'Shipping,' 'OTP,' 'slash,' 'crack,' 'flames,' and 'recs' are common words in the fic vernacular.

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Shipping is when you pair two characters together, usually romantically, and your OTP is your One True Pairing.

Slash = male/male pairings, het = male/female, femslash = female/female.

Gen means no romance.

Crack is a fic with a ridiculous plot line, usually just written for lulz.

Flames are hater comments.

Recs are recommendations of good fic that readers send each other.

And back in the day, sex scenes were called "lemons."

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I honestly have no idea why.

Fic readers hate it when authors write in the first person.

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And incomplete fics are the WORST.

Via archiveofourown.org

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Some authors go YEARS without updating a new chapter. I can't handle that kind of suspense!

Yes, there is a lot of porn.

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Hey, some of us have to have our sexual awakening somehow.

And cheesy romance.

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SHUT UP THEY LOVE EACH OTHER AND IT'S BEAUTIFUL.

But fanfiction has been around for a long time.

retronaut.com / Via blog.ha.com

This is a photo of William Shattner and Leornard Nimoy in 1967 reading a Star Trek parody comic.

In the 60s, Star Trek's Spock/Kirk shippers were sharing their steamy slash fics by mail via zines. And in the early 1900s, long before the Internet was even an idea in some nerd's mind, fans were already authoring their own versions of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. (Star Trek and Sherlock are still some of the most popular fandoms on the AO3.)

And there's something kind of amazing about it.

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Imagine loving a story so much that you refuse to let it end. And loving characters and a world so much you just want to spend time with them there. Taking stories and characters and making them better. Fulfilling a need to see more people like you represented in media.

Oh, and don't ask about The Shoebox Project.

Via orig13.deviantart.net

Save yourself the pain.

Tell us your favorite fanfiction experiences!

And feel free to leave some recs, too.